Writing Food History

A Global Perspective

Kyri W. Claflin, Peter Scholliers

• Publisher: Berg Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857852175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The vibrant interest in food studies among both academics and amateurs has made food history an exciting field of investigation. Taking stock of three decades of groundbreaking multidisciplinary research, the book examines two broad questions: What has history contributed to the development of food studies? How have other disciplines - sociology, anthropology, literary criticism, science, art history - influenced writing on food history in terms of approach, methodology, controversies, and knowledge of past foodways? Essays by twelve prominent scholars provide a compendium of global and multicultural answers to these questions. The contributors critically assess food history writing in the United States, Africa, Mexico and the Spanish Diaspora, India, the Ottoman Empire, the Far East - China, Japan and Korea - Europe, Jewish communities and the Middle East. Several historical eras are covered: the Ancient World, the Middle Ages, Early Modern Europe and the Modern day. The book is a unique addition to the growing literature on food history. It is required reading for anyone seeking a detailed discussion of food history research in diverse times and places.

Part I. The West

–1–

Food and Drink in the Ancient World

John Wilkins

Like Sinologists and Indologists, Classicists and Ancient Historians study societies that flourished a very long time ago but also interest us now. The Greeks and Romans provide models for scenes of dining made by 20th Century Fox and MGM and enjoyed by millions. They are in some ways alien cultures, but their antiquity often presses us to harness them to provide origins for modern needs and preoccupations. Thus the Greeks may provide our earliest model for the cookbook in Europe,¹ the Persians the model of hierarchical dining, the Romans the orgy, and the Hellenized Egyptians Cleopatra. But to what extent were the Greeks and Romans really like us, consuming an early version of the Mediterranean diet, recommended by the World Health Organization, and displaying power at banquets like Louis XIV or the Queen of England? Were they not, rather, “desperately foreign,” to revert to a key debate in the field of ancient history?

These questions play out in studies of society, warfare, and empire; they play out too for those who wish to taste the food of ancient Rome. Characteristic flavors, after all, were fermented fish sauce, like those of Southeast Asia, and resins made from silphium and asafetida, two members of the giant fennel family more reminiscent of Indian cooking. For some it can be done;² for others the Greeks and Romans shared our physiology but not our tastes. And whose taste are we talking about? That of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, or the great mass of the population who are not considered in many of the literary historical texts but are attested in some, particularly in Galen’s writings on nutrition, in archaeological contexts such as the drains of Herculaneum, in the inscriptions on stone dedicating meals to citizens in cities in Asia Minor,³ or in the records of professional guilds in Rome.⁴ The point may most strikingly be made by contemplating the great temples of antiquity, such as the Parthenon in Athens or the remains at Paestum or Agrigento. The tourist marvels at the vastness and sophistication of the architectural structures but must remember to add to the scene the animals being slaughtered at the altars outside and the vast complexes of dining rooms and tented areas outside where all participants shared the meat. Schmitt-Pantel’s La Cité au Banquet (1992) is particularly good at putting together literary texts, such as an elaborate scene of a sacrificial feast at Delphi in Euripides’ tragedy Ion, with decrees inscribed in stone. One example would be the Athenian democracy decreeing the personnel compose a sacrificial procession at the annual feast of Athena. Another would be a benefactor in one of the Greek cities of Asia Minor setting out exactly what each citizen will receive on a particular day. She has recently prepared a second edition (2011) with an extended bibliography.

The student of food in the ancient world could do worse than wandering around the buildings of the agora and acropolis of central Athens with Thompson and Wycherley’s The Agora of Athens (1972), those of Rome with Claridge’s Rome (1999), or those of Pompeii with Laurence’s Roman Pompeii: Space and Society (1994). Why were there so many bars and fast-food shops in Pompeii and Herculaneum? Answer: there were limited cooking facilities in the apartments and homes of ordinary citizens. Why was it so important for Greek cities to have a prytaneion, or hospitality building holding the central hearth of the city?⁵ Answer: the city offered hospitality to its honored guests in a way that kings had done in pre-polis times, such as those described in the Homeric epics. What were Roman markets like? There are many architectural descriptions in Claridge to set beside literary denunciations of merchants (not respectable people but worth investing in for the elite) and literary praises of Rome as the metropolis of the world.⁶

Questions of origins and models are not new in the field of ancient history. Under the Roman Empire, numerous authors asked similar questions about foods and dining. Athenaeus of Naucratis is a particularly important example of this, writing in the second to third century C.E. and reviewing, from the imperial world enjoyed by his contemporary Aelius Aristeides (117–181 C.E.), grand dining back through the Greek world to the courts of Assyria, Babylon, and Persia, taking in along the way additional influences from the Egyptians, Celts, and nomadic peoples of the steppes to the north and the Libyan deserts to the south, not to mention India to the east and the strange peoples of the Red Sea. The study of food belonged to ethnographies and royal histories. A further powerful approach that preoccupied Athenaeus and many of his sources, such as Plato, Polybius the historian of Rome, and Athenaeus’s contemporary Plutarch, was luxury and the idea that uncontrolled desire was a threat to the individual and to the community. This idea runs powerfully through much ancient thought about food and focuses on the excessive elaboration of the fundamental human needs of nourishment, shelter, and reproduction.⁷ Unrestrained desire was much more likely to be linked with food than alcohol in antiquity, for cultural reasons mentioned later on. Athenaeus provides an excellent example of the tension in ancient thought between models of progress from primitive human cultures and models of decline from better times. These are linked not only with notions of identity, so that in the Rome of Athenaeus’s day (about 200 C.E.) wealthy people reclined at mealtimes, a practice inherited by many Mediterranean peoples fromthe Assyrians and Persians, but also through assertion of the purity of their own past in the rural simplicity of Republican Rome where fish (and all foreign influences) were unknown and people ate bacon and emmer wheat porridge. These were part of the mythology of the imperial capital, which, as already noted, benefited from all of the goods of the known world.⁸ In the Greek version of this mythologizing of identity (Athenaeus wrote in Greek, as did Galen and Plutarch), Homer provides the model of pristine simplicity, and in fact invented the symposium centuries before the development of the polis where the symposium is now thought to have originated.

Athenaeus is also a major example of the encyclopedic, all-embracing use of knowledge that characterized the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries C.E. Reviewing the past and collecting endless examples from great authors of Greek culture such as Plato, Aristotle, and Homer were important for Athenaeus ⁹ and similar writers such as Plutarch and Galen.¹⁰ This respect for the authority of the past stimulated such collections in the fourth century C.E. as the medical compilations of Oribasius, which were mainly quotations from Galen, and the cookbook of Apicius.¹¹ The former quotes Galen and other authorities almost word for word on many different kinds of foods, while the latter is a fascinating collection of recipes that combine showy luxury items, such as flamingos, with ways of cutting corners in the kitchen. It is a composite work from numerous sources written in the later Latin of the fourth century C.E. Full of interest, it barely reflects the luxurious lifestyle of its supposed author, who lived three or more centuries earlier, depending on which “Apicius” we are talking about (he was already a legendary gourmet in Athenaeus). Both “Apicius” and Athenaeus are difficult authors to evaluate because of the composite nature of their works, but this did not hinder the interest they generated in the Renaissance and beyond¹² (for example, among those at the courts of the pope or the Holy Roman Emperor who might wish to understand and possibly imitate the great eaters of antiquity¹³).

As Athenaeus had approached ancient dining with encyclopedic aims, so the German classifiers of antiquity in the late nineteenth century gave reviews of such key issues as sacrifice and cookbooks,¹⁴ while chroniclers of Roman life gave in some detail accounts of kitchens, mealtimes, and foods.¹⁵

Approaches to Food in Ancient History

Those who wish to understand food and drink in antiquity not with a specific question but in need of general approaches and orientation can best begin with Garnsey’s Food and Society in Classical Antiquity (1999), a stimulating overview that is attuned to modern preoccupations and has an excellent bibliographical essay. This volume is to be read with three other works by Garnsey, “Les raisons de la politique” (1996), Cities, Peasants and Food in Classical Antiquity (1998), and a volume containing some of his co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Surveying Global Food Historiography
• Part I: The West
• Part II: The Middle East
• Part III: South and East Asia
• Part IV: Africa
• Conclusion: Contours of Global Food Historiography
• Bibliography
• Index